Alexandra Nelson is from Berkeley, California, and attended Stanford, where she learned to row, and attended the occasional class. After falling in love with ion channels, she worked in several labs and eventually found Neuroscience. She then went to UC San Diego’s Medical Scientist Training Program, where she worked with Sascha du Lac on cellular plasticity in the vestibular system and developed a deep fondness for spontaneously firing neurons and use of purple in figures. During graduate school, she also rowed for San Diego Rowing Club.

After a Neurology residency at UCSF, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Anatol Kreitzer at the Gladstone Institutes, where she studied striatal microcircuits. She started her own lab and joined the UCSF Neuroscience Program in 2014, focused on the cellular and circuit mechanisms of movement disorders. She continues to see patients in the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, focusing on diseases of the basal ganglia and cerebellum. She now has returned to Berkeley, where she lives with her incredibly supportive husband, wonderful daughters, and many chickens. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking lab snacks, rowing for Lake Merritt Rowing Club, and going camping with her family. She also enjoys complete sentences and fully referenced documents.